Patch 5.4 Live This Week

Patch 5.4 Live This Week
The Siege of Orgrimmar begins this week!

WoWDB Modelviewer
If you are tired of seeing armor set previews on the Human Male, we have some good news for you! We are now ready to start testing a modelviewer on WoWDB which will let you preview armor sets on the different races. This modelviewer will also work for regular items and NPCs. This will also allow us to let you see new models even faster with new PTR builds, rather than having to wait for our normal high quality previews.

Keep in mind this is a beta version! There are some bugs that need to be fixed still.

To use the modelviewer, you must have hardware acceleration turned on in Flash. Click the image below to open a version check, right click on the version, open the settings, and be sure the box is checked, similar to the image below.

After you have that working, go ahead and give it a try with Pierre by clicking the View in 3D link on WoWDB!

Patch 5.4 Notes
The final Patch 5.4 notes have been released!

New World Bosses - Ordos and the August Celestials
You can find Ordos on the Timeless Isle, but to access him you will need a legendary cloak on one of the characters on your account. Ordos drops item level 559 gear and is the more challenging boss of the new bosses, similar to Oondasta.

You can find the August Celestials in the Celestial Court in the middle of Timeless Isle. You can kill all four every week, but you will only receive loot from the first one. They all share the same loot table, which consists of item level 522 PvP gear and item level 553 PvE gear. The Celestials are the less challenging world bosses of the new bosses, similar to Nalak.

New Raid - Siege of Orgrimmar
Get ready to fight your way to Garrosh by reading the encounter journals and watching guides! Normal and Flex Wing 1 open on Tuesday.

Connected Realms
Patch 5.4 will connect low population realms into groups to form a single Connected Realm.

Players from the other realms will be treated as if they were on your realm, so you can trade, raid, and join guilds with the other players.

This solution gives all the benefits of server merges without having to give up your character or guild names.

In the process of grouping low population realms, faction balance will be taken into account as much as possible.

Connected Realms won't be applied to all of the realms that need it on patch day, but will be applied to a small group of realms as a test first. If everything works well, it will be applied to other realms similar to the release timeline of Cross-Realm Zones.

For more information, take a look at the connected realms preview below, as well as the information from developer interviews.

Flexible Raid Difficulty
Patch 5.4 will add a a new raid difficulty:

Bring anywhere from 10 to 25 people to your raid and the difficulty will automatically scale.

Works with battletags, so you can bring friends from other realms.

Item level of loot (540) is between Raid Finder (528) and Normal (553) and loot is awarded with the Raid Finder style loot system.

Separate lockout from Raid Finder and Normal, allowing you to do all three difficulties.

Timeless Isle Armor Sets
The Timeless Isle will allow players to obtain item level 496 and 535 gear through drops found around the island.

The items used to create the 496 armor are found all over the island in chests and dropped by mobs, similar to the items used to create armor in Battlefield: Barrens. The Burden of Eternity is a rare drop from mobs, found in the Blazing Chest, or in one of Kukuru's chests.

Patch 5.4 normal difficulty gear has an item level of 553, while flex gear is 540, and raid finder gear is 528. This makes the 535 Timeless gear a nice upgrade for players that will only raid in Raid Finder difficulty and a temporary upgrade for players who will be raiding Flex difficulty.

Timeless Isle - Timeless Coins Armor and Weapons
First up we have the armor and weapons that you can purchase for Timeless Coins, which are gathered by taking part in activites on the Timeless Isle. The cache items are used to create a random 496 item for your spec, as seen in the Armor Sets table above.

Timeless Isle - Bloody Coins
Patch 5.4 adds Speaker Gulan, who will sell you a Censer of Eternal Agony, which allows you to become hostile to all players (including your own faction) and kill them for Bloody Coins, which are used to purchase the items below.

Reduced Cost Vendor Gear
Patch 5.4 converted many of the items that currently cost Valor Points to Justice Points. This excludes the Shado-Pan Assault items, which were discounted by 34% from their previous prices.

New Mounts
Patch 5.4 adds several new mounts, including the very popular Sky Golem!

New Battle Pets
Patch 5.4 adds several new pets, including Pierre and Rascal-Bot!

World Changes
Orgrimmar and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms have seen some significant changes in Patch 5.4!

After collecting the stones, you embark on a series of weekly quests to use the Vision of Time in different locations to calibrate the Vision of Time. As the hourglass grows more powerful, he will send you to look at different timeways.

RPPM Changes
Patch 5.4 will be changing RPPM procs to not double dip on haste. This means procs that give a stats increase will no longer have a proc rate that scales with haste. Also, your RPPM time since last proc will be reset to 120 seconds. That means the more frequent procs will still be more or less guaranteed to go off, but the rarer (and more powerful) procs will just have a high chance.

New Music and Audio
The patch has lots of new music and audio; even Gamon has some lines!

Developer Interviews
The developers were interviewed by many different sites over the past few weeks, giving us some interesting information. Here is a very short recap of the recaps:

Proving Grounds

As long as Proving Grounds works out well, it could be used as a lower level training environment in the future.

Proving Grounds could even be used to replace item level as the gating requirement for Raid Finder or other things that use matchmaking.

Every spec in the game can get Gold in Proving Grounds for the appropriate role. Not every spec will be able to get deep into Endless. When comparing performance in Endless mode, it may be best to compare yourself to other players of the same class and spec rather than everyone.

Siege of Orgimmar

The heirloom weapons that drop from Garrosh are personal loot in Flex, Normal, and Heroic difficulty.

The first heirloom weapon that drops for you will be for your current loot spec, but after that you will get one at random

The Kor'kron Dark Shaman cosmetic armor will drop off of mobs in Flex, Normal, and Heroic difficulty Siege of Orgrimmar. The armor already existed for NPCs, so adding it is a cool bonus for Shaman. We may see more in the future if a similar situation arises

There might be some changes made to Orgrimmar in a future patch, but there won't be any dramatic changes right away.

The Horde version of the cinematic after Garrosh will show the process of the Warchief selection. The Alliance version will be slightly different.

Connected Realms

Connected Realms will roll out fairly quickly after Patch 5.4 is released, similar to the release timeline of Cross-Realm Zones.

The population targets for Connected Realms are between an average and full realm, providing enough players that you can do PuG Flex mode raids from trade chat or see a real population in the capital city, but not so many people that you have a login queue.

Future Plans

Normal difficulty raids and scenarios are good candidates for applying the Flex tech to in the future, but Normal raids are tuned tighter than Flex, so this isn't a promise at all.

There will be some kind of content and event between now and the next expansion, but the patch number isn't determined yet.

An item level squish is likely for the next expansion and is already being tested internally.

The team size has increased 40% and another 40% increase is planned, which will hopefully allow for a new content patch every month, a new raid tier every three to five months, and an annual expansion.

The technology for scaling up old content is mostly in place now, but the devs haven't come up with a good rewards scheme for scaled up old dungeons and raids yet. Today, players can go back and solo old content for transmog gear, but if they were going to go back and do it in an appropriately sized group, they would expect something useful other than transmog gear.

The character models are roughly 20 or 25% done. It is unlikely that all of the new models will be released at once. The ones that are done will be released and then more will be added throughout the patch cycle.

The new Garrosh model has a lot of bones and facial animation that could be similar to what we see in new character models. Garrosh also provides a nice test case to see if players want their character to look like that.

Battle.Net Desktop Client
If you are just coming back, you may have missed the new Battle.Net Desktop client. It is a launcher for WoW, SC2, D3, and Hearthstone that allows you to skip typing your username and password every time you play. You can find out more in our original preview or download it below.

Class Forum Guides
Several of the class forum guides are already updated for 5.4! If you don't see your class or spec represented, feel free to contribute your own guide or assist in updating an existing one.

OpenRaid Updated
OpenRaid is ready to go for creating your Patch 5.4 raids, with several runs already listed. If you want to try Throne of Thunder or Flex difficulty Siege of Orgrimmar with people from other realms, now is your chance!

WoWDB Addon Data Collection
Quickly populating the database with 5.4 additions is done with the help of many players. The more people that contribute data, the more accurately and quickly we can update the database with things like NPC locations and drop rates.

To help out, just click here if you have Curse Client already installed.

When you are playing the addon will gather data and save it. When you are done playing, Curse Client will see the game close and upload the collected data from the addon. You can see the last time data was uploaded by looking in the Plugins tab of the options, as well as making sure the addon is enabled there. If you don't normally leave it open, be sure you open Curse Client once in a while so that the data will upload!

Sorry, but if either
1-You play any recent Square Enix game
2-You believe there's any mmo out there nearly as good as wow
3-You actually think ff14-reborn is remotely good
Them you are to be considered a dirty braindead monkey.

Proving Grounds could even be used to replace item level as the gating requirement for Raid Finder or other things that use matchmaking

They better not even fucking think of that. I play MMO's to do multilayer content. If I am forced to do any single player content I will fucking quit and go play single player games. Single player content has no place in an Massive MUTIPLAYER online game and i have no clue why people want it so bad. And why the hell would you have to prove ANYTHING for LFR it's a fucking joke to begin with. Not even sure why it has an item level to get in anyway.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by Magemaer

Sorry, but if either
1-You play any recent Square Enix game
2-You believe there's any mmo out there nearly as good as wow
3-You actually think ff14-reborn is remotely good
Them you are to be considered a dirty braindead monkey.

ff14 is really good and i have played alot of mmos and its one of the best ones. But i don't see the need to compare games. You can play more then once at a time believe it or not...